


Witness

by anony_mouse



Series: Choose Well [2]
Category: Elsewhere University (Webcomic)
Genre: Deals, EU, Gen, History, No Beta, gentry
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-01-07
Updated: 2018-01-07
Packaged: 2019-03-01 12:32:35
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 914
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/13294956
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/anony_mouse/pseuds/anony_mouse
Summary: Ellipsism (n.): a sense of sadness one experiences when realizing that one won’t live to see the future





	Witness

Trojan loved history.

The lives of those who have died, working to survive or to help others or to leave their own mark on the world. The sense of life locked away behind the ink of an aging journal or a photo catching a glimpse of the past.

He's majoring in Business because the people of the ***** family are first and foremost, Sensible People. 

What would a history major do anyways? He would hate to be locked away in a classroom all day, unable to search out the scraps of life hidden from the world. The little time capsules that told stories of those who had held them or worn them or touched them last.

He's sitting in another droll economics class, staring over Ginger's head out the window to watch other students interact with each other when it hits him.

One day, all of this will be history.

Someday, another boy sitting in another class may very well look out across this same view and wonder about _him_ and his peers and what they did long ago.

And Trojan would be long buried in the ground, too dead to witness any of it.

There was something unbelievably tragic about that. About the passage of life which constrained human beings to view only the time they lived and perhaps small glimpses of the time behind them and the and not the infinity of potential which stretched out after them.

He would never know the stories of the future. How his generation would be viewed in the long lens of time. Which parts of his world would be deemed important by historians and which would be consigned to the vast pit of forgotten memories that accumulated every moment of human history. What would be wrong, warped by the passage of time. What new discoveries would be made, possible only due to technologies not yet made.

But.

There were whispers. And not-quite whispers.

Trojan had ignored them before because *****s are Sensible People.

And Sensible People don't believe in fairy tales.

But.

_But._

Sensible People don't want to live in the past the present and the future either.

He is careful in his asking. The people who have the answers he seeks are cautious and give him the most knowing looks if he gives away too much. Pity. Fear. Resignation.

As if he would be careless enough to be one of those. The ones that came back broken and different. 

Joke's on them- he wasn't coming back. He was no Custer and this was not his Little Bighorn. He had a foolproof plan.

Trojan was a Sensible Person. He would not go unprepared or uncertain. He had the Salt his RA gave him, the Cleverness of the Business students, the Knowledge of past Deals, and his grandfather's Sound Mind to keep him steady and safe.

He went to Her prepared. Armed with just enough silver to be Aware. Enough Iron to be untouchable, and enough Salt to get away if necessary. He had written and written and rehearsed his Request for months and made certain that there were no loopholes to be exploited. He had a list of precisely what he was willing to Trade.

She spoke with a voice that held an echo of every voice ever spoken.

He gave Her his terms and waited anxiously for a response. He was carful not to fidget or show signs of weakness. He wondered if google would still exist in the future, and if he could use it or its equivalent to look himself up.

Nothing about Her eerily still Presence shifted, but he still got the sense that She was smiling.

It wasn't a good sense.

She reached for him, and tilted his head up to see him better.

Every nerve of his body screamed for him to run, to apologize and take it all back. But he held his ground. Theodore Roosevelt wasn't well known because he'd bowed to challenges.

Her whisper held the sighs of a thousand generations long gone.

He swallowed his nerves and nodded. 

The sense of Her smile grew stronger and Trojan's body froze, and mind locked on the memory that Teddy Roosevelt had succumbed to the weakness of his body in the end. 

Wait _wait **waitWaitWAIT**_.

Too late.

George Armstrong Custer had gotten the command he had because he had been known for his boldness and decisiveness in battle.

Trojan didn't know if he screamed.

He did.

He watched all of history happening.

He watched himself being born.

He watched a young girl dancing in a meadow.

He watched an old man crash his car into a pole. He watched two young men die under the fists of a screaming crowd. He watched an explosion of light- fireworks- over an empty field. He watched a mother giving her son battlefield surgery as gunfire echoed around them. Hewatchedthe49thpresidentoftheUnitedStates'innauguration. Hewatchedaplanecrashhewatchedsoldiersdyinghewatchedawomanhitherhusband _afatherkisshisdaughter'shead **achildswimminginapondbrdssngng**_ -

He watched himself die. Screaming. Alone. Arrogant and cocky and so sure of himself. So stupid.

He watched the memory of him fade into the fog of Elsewhere University. He watched his family mourn for a time before the fog swallowed them as well.

Hewatchedhewatchedhewatchedhewatched. Grandmother'slastbreathgirljumpingoffabridgeboygraduatinghighschoolmusicconcertfirstkiss _manpullingtriggerpersonbalancingaledge **doghidingbone**_ -

He watched a boy, sitting in a class, looking out a window and wondering about history decide that he wanted to see the future firsthand.

He watched that boy throw his future away.

There once was a boy. His true name was unimportant, but he was known as Trojan.

Trojan loved history.

**Author's Note:**

> Doing a series based on weird, obscure words may have been A Mistake.
> 
> Elsewhere University belongs to @elsewhereuniversity and/or @charminglyantiquated. These are merely my longer submissions into the universe.
> 
> No beta. All mistakes are mine.


End file.
